Brain, liver, heart.... Justabout
every organfrom a laboratoryratis
representedin a series of tissue
sections mounted on slides (right)at
Dow Chemical's Toxicology Research
Laboratoryin Midland,Michigan.
HistologistDebraWackerle arranges
them for examinationby a veterinary
pathologist.
Earlier,laboratoryanimals had
been given graduateddoses of a new
compound. By taking tissue sections
of various organs and examining the
slides, the company can identify
which organs have been affected,
helping to gauge the level of exposure
considered safe.
In a metabolismtest at Dow (left)
researchbiologist Mark Dryzga
collects urinefrom a rat to find out
how much of a new compound is
absorbedby the rat and how fast it is
eliminated.From such tests Dow can
determine how much of the
compound might accumulate over
time in the tissues of an animal.
dumping in old mines and in the North Sea,"
Heinemann told me. "Italy? A basket case!
Sweden agitates piously against ocean incin
eration, but lets its industry give us waste
anyway-keeps it out of Swedish landfills."
Flying over the North Sea a few days lat
er, I peered into the huge incinerator stacks
of the Vulcanus II, glowing orange with
burning waste. Gray wisps of steam carried
away dilute hydrochloric acid, which fell to
the sea and turned to salt. By neutralizing its
exhaust with seawater instead of expensive
stack scrubbers, the ship can dispose of
waste at half the cost of incinerating it on
land. For years EPA has considered allow
ing Vulcanus II and a sister ship to inciner
ate waste in the Gulf of Mexico, but Gulf
coast residents who fear toxic slicks and
dead fish have kept the idea in dry dock.
In Bavaria and in two other West German
states, collecting stations funnel most toxic
waste to regional incinerators and landfills
funded by industry and government. East
Germany, however, serves as Europe's
dumping ground to earn hard currency.
Crude pits there take foreign waste at such
low rates that West Germany has limited
border crossing points for waste ship
ments-lest "toxic tourism" grow.
THE DYNAMICS of disposal in Germa
ny impressed me most at a salt mine on
the East-West frontier. Since 1972 Kali
und Salz AG has bricked up waste in
caverns left by miners, salting it away in for
mations stable for 250 million years and pre
sumed immutable for eons more.
"Each year we mine, we gain 30 more
years of disposal space," said engineer Nor
bert Deisenroth, showing me maps. Dated
and multicolored, they cataloged 400,000
tons of waste in drums. "Purple ... August
14, 1978... Kepone pesticide... Vir
ginia." West Germans must cope with old
dumps and half-forgotten war rubble con
taining live bombs and chemical weapons,
but they've avoided calamity comparable to
the dumping that in the 1970s extensively
polluted Virginia's James River with toxic
residues of Kepone production.
The Japanese, otherwise fastidious, have
suffered cruelly from careless disposal of
hazardous waste. In the 1950s at Minamata
Bay in southern Japan, waste mercury from
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